Richards Rocking as Red Bulls Roll

Midfielder Has Been an Integral Piece—and a Scoring Machine—in the Team's March to the Playoffs

By

Joshua Robinson

Updated Nov. 1, 2010 12:01 a.m. ET

Once Dane Richards sent the penalty kick rolling under Trinidad and Tobago's goalkeeper, he trotted back toward his Jamaican teammates for a muted celebration. A hug or two, a couple of high-fives, and back to work. He barely cracked a gap-toothed smile.

Back in the United States, Hans Backe, who coaches Mr. Richards with the New York Red Bulls, was far more amused. Two weeks since hearing about the Oct. 10 goal, he was still chuckling when it came up. Mr. Richards, he explained delicately, is hardly the first player to pick to handle the pressure of a penalty kick. His history of squandering chances and erratic shooting made him a less than natural candidate.

So Mr. Backe was surprised, to say the least.

ENLARGE

During a recent practice, Dane Richards, far right, controls the ball and flashes the speed that has helped to make him one of the Red Bulls' most potent goal scorers.
Emile Wamsteker for The Wall Street Journal

"I'm happy I can surprise everybody in a good way," Mr. Richards, 26, said last week. "Once I'm playing with confidence, I think I can do anything."

A little more than a year ago, Mr. Richards felt entirely the opposite. He dreaded each new game as the Red Bulls dug themselves into the cellar of the Eastern Conference with the worst record in the league.

When his friends in Jamaica asked what was going on, he had no answers. Every kick-off brought a feeling of "Please, don't let this happen again."

But playing as if to exorcise the ghosts of last year, the team has made a complete reversal. And so has Mr. Richards. Once saddled with a reputation for being blessed with plenty of speed and not much else, he has emerged as a key factor in the Red Bulls' march to the playoffs, scoring five times in the last seven games of the regular season. They opened their postseason campaign on Saturday night with a 1-0 victory over the San Jose Earthquakes—the return leg is on Thursday at Red Bull Arena.

"He's more aware now of how to use his strengths, how to use his pace," Mr. Backe said. "And from July or August, everything just switched to become perfect."

In his own quiet way, Mr. Richards is brimming with self-assurance. Publicly, he never makes predictions, sticking instead to the gospel of hard work. But sitting in the Weehawken apartment he shares with midfielder Joel Lindpere—a 29-year-old Estonian who makes up the other half of this Red Bulls odd couple—he sometimes cannot help himself.

Before they faced the New England Revolution in their final outing of the regular season, Mr. Richards turned to his roommate over lunch and said, "Today, both of us are going to score." By the time they got home that night, each of them had another goal to his name.

Mr. Richards himself cannot pinpoint anything specific that has changed about him, except that he now has the statistics to show for his extra time on the practice field. His marked improvement, however, did happen to coincide with the injection of two world-class players into the Red Bulls' starting lineup —French striker Thierry Henry and Mexican playmaker Rafa Marquez.

With their sheer presence and precise distribution, opening up space on the field, they have made life easier for their teammates. But Richards said the real privilege has been watching Mr. Henry in training, picking up advice on positioning and even the odd compliment.

Not so long ago, Richards was a teenager cheering him on in front of a television set in Montego Bay, Jamaica, 4,700 miles from London, where Mr. Henry blazed past defenders.

"I remember when he got here, the first week, Henry said if I made the correct run, nobody in the league can catch me," Mr. Richards said in his musical Caribbean accent. "This guy's like lightning. And for him to say that to me…Oh, that was unbelievable."

Within six weeks, Mr. Richards picked up his first goal of the year for the Red Bulls—in a midseason exhibition against Manchester City—and then came to life for the Jamaican national team. He scored one and set up another in a 3-1 victory over Trinidad and Tobago in August.

Mr. Richards is consistently rated as one of the quickest players in MLS. And he recognizes that sometimes, his feet move faster than he can think.

But like it was for so many of his compatriots in the track and field world, that gift represented his ticket out of Jamaica. "I don't know, it's something we're eating down there," he said. "We always have fast guys."

Growing up in a small community of 3,000 people, he was always being told he could turn professional some day. The friends who watched him on the little dirt field were sure of it. Mr. Richards wasn't.

Still, he dreamed of some day getting a scholarship that would take him to the United States, a place he only knew from movies and second-hand accounts until his senior year of high school. That is when his team was rewarded with a trip to New York for winning the All-Island championship.

"I think I had a crook-neck because I was looking at all the buildings," Mr. Richards said, adding that he knew instantly he simply had to make it back.

But his roundabout return came with stops in Texas and South Carolina. After high school, he earned that coveted scholarship thanks to the blind faith of Ben Hunter, the head coach at San Jacinto, a junior college in Houston.

When Hunter recruited him, he did not even know what Mr. Richards looked like. All he had was the recommendation of a Jamaican player on his team. The gamble did not take long to pay off.

"He was the best player we had," Mr. Hunter said. Coaches across the country agreed with him. In 2004, they voted Mr. Richards the national junior college player of the year, paving his way to a four-year school.

Ultimately, that school was Clemson, where he tasted the NCAA Tournament and the national semifinals. And again, he heard people telling him he could graduate to the professional ranks. This time, it was his coaches. Bruce Arena and the Red Bulls proved them right when they selected him in the second round of the 2007 MLS SuperDraft.

For the first time in his life, speed was not enough. The tricks he used on college fields were clichés in MLS. He could not just poke the ball past defenders and chase it down anymore. And shifting from the center-forward position to the flank meant learning another set of responsibilities. It was a set of adjustments that, perhaps, took until the last few months to finally sink in—for him to catch up to his feet.

"I used to just want to play well," Mr. Richards said. "But now I believe I can score a goal in every game."

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